Friday, November 23, 2018

Steal This Show S04E09: ‘Is The Future Of Secrets Shared?’ | TorrentFreak

After a series of high-profile hacks, trusting social media corporations to store and safeguard our personal information looks an increasingly bad idea. And many are understandably wary about letting platforms look after their cryptocurrency investments. Custody of our digital assets, it seems, is shaping up to be a key issue for network citizens.

Enter Dark Crystal, an Ethereum Foundation-funded project enabling users to store private keys — from Bitcoin to email encryption and beyond — with and inside their communities and social networks. To do this, Dark Crystal makes use of the mathematical magic behind Shamir’s Shared Secret, allowing groups of friends to safely store different ‘shards’ of a key, bringing it together as and when needed.

In this episode, we meet Peg and Kieran from Dark Crystal to discuss the implications of the project: what happens when custody of our most precious digital resources can be taken away from banks and megacorps and entrusted to friends, family and community? And do projects like Dark Crystal signal the beginning of a new, cryptography-based ‘information commons’?